| ▲ | Show HN: Kraa – Writing App for Everything(kraa.io) |
| 67 points by levmiseri a day ago | 37 comments |
| Hello HN! We're a team of three building a new kind of web-based markdown editor. There are many editors out there, so one is spoiled for choice, but Kraa's approach is a little different. It's trying to be both a minimal and distraction-free experience while being feature-rich and allowing for tons of use cases. What Kraa's good for: - Distraction-free writing & reading (minimal UI, performant, styling logic completely separated from the editing experience) - Quick sharing of any written text – compared to many other writing tools, your content can be easily shared just by posting a link and giving 'read' or 'edit' access (we also have password-protection) - Real-time chat / communities – Kraa has some unique features around real-time editing and our Chat widget allows for a frictionless chat experience. No send button. - Kraa works well on mobile (though dedicated apps are planned) --- Demo examples (all live, no login needed): Blog article: https://kraa.io/kraa/examples/echolibrary Long-form story: https://kraa.io/kraa/examples/insidekick Magazine: https://kraa.io/weeklyinspiration Kraa is built on top of ProseMirror (and TipTap) and Svelte. You don’t need an account to try Kraa. We’d really appreciate your thoughts and feedback! |
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| ▲ | vinclou 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| Apparently, Notion, Obsidian, Google Docs, Word, Notes, Reminders, Evernote, Bear, Typora, iA Writer, Ulysses, Standard Notes, Simplenote, Roam, LogSeq, Craft, Vim, Emacs and the hundreds other editors launched this week alone just weren't doing it. They were too cluttered. Too focused. Too specific in their use cases. Not online. Too offline. |
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| ▲ | steego 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| After watching a bunch of people use the live chat, I am not discouraged by live chat anymore. I actually think one can make it work, one simply needs to account for moderation and flooding upfront. The first feature you need is a way to instantly ignore people who are ruining the collective experience. I would think when a person is ignored by a certain threshold of people, their content should automatically be moderated. The second feature that’s needed is some sort of flood protection or detection. If a user is pasting or trying to flood the chat with characters, they should be instantly hidden and their content be subject to moderation. Being able to distinguish between copying and pasting on occasion and flooding goes a long way. |
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| ▲ | _thisdot 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The recently sunsetted Reddit public chat was a good example. They were tied to a subreddit, so only people with some shared interest came together. And the moderators could set an entry barrier based on karma. And you stood to lose your reddit account if you misbehaved in a public chat | | |
| ▲ | steego 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I understand and appreciate Reddit’s approach. On the other hand, I think there might be a way to solve this problem for live anonymous chat in a way that doesn’t rely on threats of “punishment” or “banning”. I think most people looking at this problem don’t appreciate how much realtime information can be calculated from the event stream and how that information can be leveraged toward solving it in near realtime. |
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| ▲ | embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The first feature you need is a way to instantly ignore people who are ruining the collective experience. I Yeah, and we all know you're talking about Anon Pond Heron, lets be honest. | | |
| ▲ | steego 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am. While I’m not the kind of person who races to test the most triggering racial slurs, I’m actually glad Anon Pond Heron did because I thought his behavior was informative, especially as you could watch him slowly type out the beginnings of a slur. I actually think these types of CRDTs can be enhanced with a handful of simple mechanisms to ensure a higher quality chat experience. |
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| ▲ | embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| - Click "Start Writing" - Start typing, nothing happens - Editor apparently didn't focus, I try clicking anywhere on the page to give text editor focus - Editor doesn't focus when you click on it? For being an experience "all about writing", I sure don't understand how to get started? I click in the middle of the page, but nothing is focusing? Using Firefox 145.0.1. |
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| ▲ | levmiseri 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is embarrassing and a recent regression on the latest update. Thanks for the report, we will fix this. | |
| ▲ | previnder an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Clicking on the line with the cursor worked for me. | | | |
| ▲ | grvdrm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Using Safari (OSX). No problems. | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sorry to be doubting, but are you sure? I got curious, and looked at the DOM, and seems the editor when empty is just one line of the full page, which if you click anywhere else (like what I did initially, in the middle of the page) the editor can't be focused. Are you sure you clicked in the middle of the page? Looks like this for me: https://i.imgur.com/DOdiN4o.png Unless you click that specific rectangle, the editor doesn't focus, isn't it the same in Safari? |
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| ▲ | dmje 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Intriguing. But - the first thing I want to know it "how much" and then shortly after that I want to know "can I run it myself". |
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| ▲ | levmiseri 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What you see now will always be free. In 2026 we will introduce a 'pro' tier that will increase storage space for media/images and additional advanced features. No self-hosting planned for now. | |
| ▲ | tigroferoce 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This should be the first and most important question anyone asks when trying a new product/service. If I don't understant the business model and how much I could be locked-in, I don't even bother wasting 1 minute on the product (I might tray that to get inspiration, but I probably wouldn't use that for anything serious). | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > If I don't understant the business model and how much I could be locked-in, I don't even bother wasting 1 minute on the product Personally I do it the other way around, first I try it out and see if it's useful, then I'd figure out if I'm willing to accept the tradeoffs of pricing/lock-in. If you do it the way you suggest, wouldn't that mean you can't actually understand if the business model is fine because of the benefits you get? Seems backwards to me. |
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| ▲ | taco_emoji an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| i don't get it. if i need to write a document, i'll still use google docs. if i want to write a blogpost, i'll use a blog hosting platform. if I want a wiki, i'll use a wiki platform > It's not designed to be this or that well then why am i using it |
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| ▲ | levmiseri a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Example of the real-real-time chat: https://kraa.io/hackernews |
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| ▲ | heliumtera 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I couldn't see the value of this application until I went on this link and saw the euphoria.
Whatever this means, there's certainly a place for unfiltered, unmoderated "anonymous" chat.
This is promising, but I still don't understand why it always had to end in penis. Anyway, I liked this. Consider making sent messages as immutable, it's very distracting people editing old messages. | |
| ▲ | GaryBluto 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Shows a lot of confidence in their own service when they link to their "main" chatroom on another live chat provider. | |
| ▲ | kylecazar 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This went to hell fairly quickly | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Everyone learns some important lessons the first time they allow user-generated content on the public internet, particularly if you're brave enough to allow so without any login :) It's a rite of passage at this point I think, lucky OP :) | | |
| ▲ | bonesss 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m reminded, by the ascii art d’s, about a metric used in game dev where users can shape content, something to the effect of time to penis (TTP): defined as the time from tool availability to when users abuse said tool to craft dong. Supposedly it’s pretty quick. |
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| ▲ | input_sh 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Really? IMO it went about as well as I expected given the audience. |
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| ▲ | imcritic 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is damn awesome! Edit: at first I thought it was too damn awesome, but then I noticed that my phone is overheating after just a few minutes watching the live chat. |
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| ▲ | ramon156 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Without sounding negative, i see a lot of bells and whistles For UX it seems better to only show features when you need it. You're up against a physical notepad. Maybe I'm not the target audience |
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| ▲ | levmiseri 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Could you please expand on this? Showing only the features you need is pretty much what we tried to do. Keeping the writing UI minimal and distraction-free. |
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| ▲ | qntmfred an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| nice work. i'm curious, what's the architecture for authorization? |
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| ▲ | wiz21c 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The Food Recipe example link doesn't go to a food recipe :-( |
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| ▲ | heliumtera 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Congrats!
This was something I have not seen before.
People loved it, apparently.
Real time chat makes it so even with few users, there is so much happening.
Unfortunately moderation could be a problem. Good luck with it.
Gos bless you, my morning is a little bit happier now |
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| ▲ | dwa3592 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Beautiful. Is it E2E encrypted? |
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| ▲ | bilekas an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I was looking for this too. shared one that was client side encrypted. No realtime chat though. SecuriNote.com | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Does it matter? They'll surely wouldn't implement a local/client-first E2E encryption, so in the end they'll be holding the keys anyways. If you want something private, don't put it on other people's platforms, it's very simple. | | |
| ▲ | bilekas an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Does it matter? They'll surely wouldn't implement a local/client-first E2E encryption, so in the end they'll be holding the keys anyways Yes it matters, there are use cases if not only for privacy focus people. Why would the hold the keys? I actually have found a good example of one that I am working to verify. | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Because currently they have search and they do user-to-user messaging, good luck implementing that over the web in a reliable and scalable way with E2E encryption. |
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| ▲ | levmiseri 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, it is not. But that's high on the list of things we're focusing on. |
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| ▲ | _kidlike 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| self hosting when? |